This blog is dedicated to bringing World War II era tank archives to a wider audience, by translating them into English if necessary and providing some historical context to those unfamiliar with it.
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Wednesday, 20 November 2013

Tank Plans for 1942

Following up the 1941 plans, let's look at the plans for the next year. The past few months have been hard for the USSR. While the German plan to cripple the Red Army in one swift strike failed, industry suffered, and a number of projects were cut. Let's see what the changes look like:

CAMD RF 38-11355-694

6000 KV tanks are to be built, including 1200 in the first quarter (350 in January, and then 50 more each subsequent month). This is 6 times more than the total amount of KV tanks Kirov Factory was assigned during the peace time, but ChTZ is set to help. There is no radio-less version (all KV tanks had radios). One tank costs 635,000 rubles.

15,000 T-34s are to be produced, 6,000 with radios and 9,000 without. The orders are split among three factories: #183, #112, and STZ. A T-34 with a radio costs between 274,500 and 324,500 rubles. A T-34 without costs 269,000-320,000. Leaving out a radio did not result in significant savings, only 5,000 rubles per unit. The price difference between #183 and the other factories is explained by a redesign to the tank, to increase reliability and simplify manufacturing that did not have time to spread.

There is still a plan for factory #174 to produce T-50 tanks, 600 with a radio and 900 without. One T-50 costs 298,000 rubles, a radio on it is an extra 2,000. The cost is one of the reasons why the tank did not make it into production. Why make a light tank with a 45 mm gun when you can have a medium tank with a 76 mm gun for basically the same price?

Next we have T-60s. A total of 27,500 were to be built by a number of factories (#37, ZiS, HTZ, GAZ, Kolominskiy), only 4650 of them with radios. Unlike variably priced T-34s, each T-60 costs the same amount: 81,000 for a regular version, 82,700 for one with a radio. A third of the cost of a T-34? Now that's how you make a light tank!

The total numbers add up to 500,000 units, 8150 of which will be needed in the first quarter. The bill totals up to, 110,181,050,000 rubles for the tanks alone, not including service, parts, crew salaries, etc. War is expensive.